Putin’s Act of Desperation: Two Incompatible Ideologies for Russia

It has been obvious even to casual observers of the Russian political scene that the country, ever since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, has had a severe problem with ideological self-definition.

This is not surprising. The country has gone through remarkable political changes over a century — changes that required ideological reformulation at every step of the way.

A hundred years of change

In a span of 100 years, it has overthrown a centuries-old monarchical rule that drew its ideological inspiration from the Eastern Roman Empire. It then created the embryo of a new universalist classless state that, in theory, should have been joined by all societies that adopted communism.

This cosmopolitan project became Russianized after the Second World War, with Russia being, tacitly, treated as a senior partner in the Union. (Being a senior partner did not always come with advantages, as Russia was the only republic without its own Communist party or its own Academy of Sciences.)

And then, it decided to destroy that Union, which some of its population and its leader in particular perceived as a burden, and to create a big — but much more territorially limited — oligarchic republic. In its brief existence, it oscillated between anarchy and rule of business leaders-cum-assassins.

Under Putin, the rise of intelligence services to the top created an entirely new situation that, in turn, required an ideological rationalization.

The intelligence services ascend

The uniqueness of the rise of the intelligence services to the top ranks of power in Russia is often not correctly assessed. It is true that secret or intelligence services were always very powerful, in the Empire or the Soviet Union. But in both cases, they were not the deciders.

The Okhrana, the secret police force in the late 19th and early 20th century, was under the formal and often (but not always) effective control of the Tsar and its entourage. For sure, like any intelligence service, at times it carried out operations on its own. Most famously and bizarrely, in order to evoke workers’ discontent, it created “false” trade unions — an operation that backfired spectacularly. But it certainly did not rule the land.

Likewise, the power of Cheka, NKVD, MVD and finally KGB derived from the Politburo and later from Stalin. And even after Stalin, all the way to the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union (under Andropov), the power emanated from the Politburo.

In a recent book on Russia, the NKVD’s omnipotence is allegedly illustrated by its massive executions of people during the Great Terror. But this is a misinterpretation of its power.

The NKVD was simply executing people on Stalin’s orders. It was a tool, not a decider. Even under Beria, who surely had more power than any of his predecessors, it was doing what it was told. The party controlled both the sword and the shield that are shown on Cheka’s coat of arms.

What is Russia?

This head-spinning succession of changes over the past hundred years has understandably led to intellectual confusion. What is the Russian idea and the country’s raison d’etre?

Yeltsin, naively, believed that if he organized a (paid) competition for the best national idea, the problem could be solved. Is Russia an empire, a multi-ethnic federation, an ethnic-based country or a community of all Russians anywhere (русский мир)? A beacon for the world or a self-interested imperial power?

The ideological confusion, present since the 1990s, has reached its apogee under the current rule by the secret police. Intelligence services in Russia seem to believe that ideologies can be proclaimed by decree. Ideologies are, it seems, the same as nominations to a higher post or the decisions to designate somebody a “foreign agent.”

It suffices to put together three secret policemen and three university professors in the same room for three days, and they would come up with the ideology that will be then declared by a ukase.

Putin’s Russia: Between empire and autocracy

Putin has therefore formulated two distinct and mutually incompatible ideologies. Domestically, it is the ideology of a great imperial nation that has been unjustly shorn of some of its attributes by Communist, and especially Leninist, rule.

In his famous long historical article, published in the summer of 2021, Putin criticized Russian Bolsheviks and Lenin personally for pushing the Eastern Ukraine revolutionary regime (Donetsk-Krivoy Rog republic) against its own wishes to become a part of the Ukrainian republic.

The “Leninist” borders thus artificially separated eastern Ukraine, populated mostly by ethnic Russians, from their Russian brethren. Communism is attacked for destroying Russia and “Russianness.”

The patriarch, the priests and all the assortment of such individuals known from the 19th century processions are brought back for every state occasion: From the blessing of the troops sent to die on the front, to various anniversaries or funerals.

Putin openly fashions the country (and perhaps himself) on the Tsarist three ideological pillars — autocracy, pan-slavism and orthodoxy. But while these pillars had some sense under the Romanovs, they scarcely have any today, except for autocracy.

Contradictions in Putin’s imperial vision

How can Russia’s ideology be the protection of Slavs and orthodoxy when it is engaged in a war against a Slavic and orthodox nation closest to itself in culture and history?

Indeed, the Tsars also suppressed Ukrainian nationalism (which was an entirely marginal political force then), but they did not send drones on Kiev.

Even autocracy, the only plausible connection between Tsardom and FSB-ism, rests on shaky roots: Autocracy (Emperor, the autocrat, царь самодержец) was based on a multi-century tradition, derived from Byzantine caesaro-papism. It thus had both cultural and historical roots. Nothing remotely alike exists in the current regime.

But to make the ideological confusion complete — and this is my principal point — for international consumption Putin has devised an entirely different ideology. This has happened with force since 2022 and the war with Ukraine.

Russia: The new leader of the global majority?

According to that narrative, Russia is the new leader of the global majority and is leading the rest of the world in the opposition to the hegemony of the richest and most powerful states.

Putin’s international ideology appears like some risible ersatz of Lenin’s 1920s synthesis of Marxism and anti-colonial struggle. But while Lenin was a serious theoretician, the current leaders are not.

Lenin saw the Soviet Union as a prototype of the classless and cosmopolitan state in accordance with key Marxist tenets. Such a state would naturally be an ally in the anti-colonial struggle of the rising Asian and African nations.

It was fully ideologically coherent to support, say, India and China in their anti-colonial struggles even when the main domestic forces in those countries were bourgeois because the Soviet Union stood for internationalism and the end of colonial exploitation.

It is ludicrous to claim for Russia internationally the ideology it explicitly rejects domestically. How can a country that, according to self-description, stands for autocracy and nationalism lead the “Global South” in its struggle for a more equitable world?

An ideological impasse

One cannot affirm the principles of imperialism and nationalism in the morning to one audience, and in the afternoon, when speaking to a different audience, proclaim himself to be an internationalist and in favor of equality of all nations.

Russia thus finds itself ideologically at a total impasse. This applies not only in the projection of its ideology domestically, where similar contradictions exist in the treatment of Tsarist and communist experiences. For example, is Stalin great because he won the Second World War or a villain who mined and exploded hundreds of Russian orthodox churches?

But most crucially at the global level where the contradiction between nationalism for domestic purposes and (alleged) internationalism for foreign purposes shows fully its paradoxical nature.

The high cost of Russia’s conflicted identity

The issue perhaps would not be so important if Russia were some small country where similar ideological contradictions might matter for the country itself, but not for the rest of the world (Serbia and Croatia are such examples.)

But the question of what is the dominant ideology in Russia and how Russia sees itself both in regard to its own history and to the world today, can become (and is) dramatically important because it might lead now, or in a few years’ time, to bigger wars and conflicts and even nuclear apocalypse.

While power is always important, the use of that power is shaped by countries’ and leaders’ perceptions of what they are fighting for, and what they can convince their citizens to die for. That is why the role of ideology is crucial in all modern societies, as indeed it was in the past.